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Book Description

Revising and Editing for Translators provides guidance and learning materials for translation students and professional translators learning to revise the work of others or edit original writing, and those wishing to improve their self-revision ability. Revising and editing are seen as reading skills aimed at spotting problematic passages. Changes are then made to meet some standard of quality that varies with the text and to tailor the text to its readership.

Mossop offers in-depth coverage of a wide range of topics, including copyediting, stylistic editing, checking for consistency, revising procedures and principles, and translation quality assessment—all related to the professional situations in which revisers and editors work. This revised fourth edition provides new chapters on revising machine outputs and news trans-editing, a new section on reviser competencies, and a completely new grading scheme for assignments.

The inclusion of suggested activities and exercises, numerous real-world examples, and a reference glossary make this an indispensable coursebook for professional translation programmes.

Table of Contents

List of Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction for All Readers

Introduction for Instructors

1. Why Editing and Revising are Necessary

1.1 The difficulty of writing

1.2 Enforcing rules

1.3 Quality in translation

1.4 Limits to editing and revision

1.5 The proper role of revision

Summary

Further reading

2. The Work of an Editor

2.1 Tasks of editors

2.2 Editing, rewriting and adapting

2.3 Mental editing during translation

2.4 Editing non-native English

2.5 Crowd-sourced editing of User Generated Content

2.6 Degrees of editing

2.7 Editing procedure

Practice

Further reading

3. Copyediting

3.1 House style

3.2 Spelling and typing errors

3.3 Syntax and idiom

3.4 Punctuation

3.5 Usage

Practice

Further reading

4. Stylistic Editing

4.1 Tailoring language to readers

4.2 Smoothing

4.3 Readability versus intelligibility and logic

4.4 Stylistic editing during translation

4.5 Some traps to avoid

Practice

Further reading

5. Structural Editing

5.1 Physical structure of a text

5.2 Problems with prose

5.3 Problems with headings

5.4 Structural editing during translation

Practice

Further reading

6. Content Editing

6.1 Macro-level content editing

6.2 Factual errors

6.3 Logical errors

6.4 Mathematical errors

6.5 Content editing during translation

6.6 Content editing after translation

Practice

7. Trans-editing by Jungmin Hong

7.1 Trans-editing versus translating

7.2 Structural trans-editing

7.3 Content trans-editing

7.4 Combined structural and content trans-editing

7.5 Trans-editing with changed text-type

7.6 Trans-editing from multiple source texts

Exercises and discussion

Further reading

8. Checking for Consistency

8.1 Degrees of consistency

8.2 Pre-arranging consistency

8.3 Translation databases and consistency

8.4 Over-consistency

Practice

Further reading

9. Computer Aids to Checking

9.1 Google to the rescue?

9.2 Bilingual databases

9.3 Work on screen or on paper?

9.4 Editing functions of word processors

9.5 What kind of screen environment?

9.6 Tools specific to revision

Further reading

10. The Work of a Reviser

10.1 Revision: a reading task

10.2 Revision terminology

10.3 Reviser competencies

10.4 Revision and specialization

10.5 The revision function in translation services

10.6 Reliance on self-revision

10.7 Reducing differences among revisers

10.8 Crowd-sourced revision

10.9 Revising translations into the reviser’s second language

10.10 Quality-checking by clients

10.11 The brief

10.12 Balancing the interests of authors, clients, readers and translators

Author(s)

Biography

Brian Mossop was a French-to-English translator, reviser and trainer at the Canadian Government’s Translation Bureau from 1974 to 2014. He continues to lead workshops and webinars on revision in Canada and abroad. Since 1980, he has also been a part-time instructor at the York University School of Translation in Toronto, teaching revision, scientific translation, translation theory and translation into the second language.

Reviews

"It breaks down and explains editing and revising practices in a simple way … making the text an easy and pleasant read. Teachers, both in academic and non-academic contexts, will avail themselves of the easy-to-follow categorization of the contents of the book, in the event that they want to design a course or module on editing and revising."